If you were an environmentally conscious American shopper just a few years ago and lived outside the orbit of health-food stores, farmers’ markets, and coops, you had to search high and low for goods that would pass muster as “organic.” Today, though, with heightened awareness of the health-enhancing or health-damaging effects of food, many more foods bear that moniker and are more widely available, just as elsewhere in the world organic goods are becoming ever more prominent in the marketplace.

One person’s “organic,” though, is another’s industrial. It’s only been in the very recent past that manufacturers and regulatory agencies have been able to agree on just what that term means. Even so, there’s some variation: the National Organic Standards Board considers organic agriculture to be “an ecological production management system that promotes and enhances biodiversity, biological cycles and soil biological activity. It is based on minimal use of off-farm inputs and on management practices that restore, maintain and enhance ecological harmony.”

This ecological definition shades, ever so gently, the meaning most people associate with the term—namely, the use of nonchemical fertilizers and pesticides as the food is growing. Canada’s organic regulations, instituted only a few months ago, specifically prohibit “synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs),” however.

It’s most useful for American consumers to understand organic as a label with a very particular, and quite legal, meaning. In 1980 branding foods and other consumer items as organic was an act of goodwill based on an informal honor system. Today the label is more rigorously controlled, and organic certification requires that the grower or processor indeed not use synthetic chemicals (including food additives) or genetically modified materials; that the farmland of origin have been kept free of such chemicals for at least three years; and that the producer be open to regular inspection to assure that standards are maintained.

The United States Department of Agriculture puts it this way: “Organic crops are raised without using most conventional pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, or sewage sludge-based fertilizers. Animals raised on an organic operation must be fed organic feed and given access to the outdoors. They are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.” Considering the alternatives by these very definitions, there’s good reason to seek out organic food.

But there’s a rub, at least in the United States. Whereas European governments tend to be stricter with their terms, the USDA allows a sliding scale that opens up on the rigorous side: as of October 2002, only goods that are made entirely of certified organic materials and methods are labeled “100 percent organic,” while those whose makeup is only 95 percent pure, so to speak, are labeled “organic.” Both categories can bear a USDA seal of approval. (For whatever reason, salt and water are exempted from consideration. Are these not organic by definition? Well….)

Less straightforward is another category, though, which permits the use of up to 30 percent nonorganic materials and methods in a product, which may then be legally labeled “made with organic ingredients.” Products that are less than 70 percent organic may not use the label, though an organic ingredient within the mix may be advertised as such. And if a product is made with what the USDA calls “excluded methods, sewage sludge, or ionizing radiation“—powerfully unattractive words, those—then forget about using the word “organic” in any kind of proximity with it. (Forget about using the product at all, for that matter.)

Careful shoppers will want to understand the meaning of those labels, which could, it seems to me, be a little easier to follow. I wonder why a pure product shouldn’t be labeled “100 percent organic,” while a lesser one shouldn’t be labeled precisely: “50 percent organic,” “10 percent organic,” “Absolutely no organic whatever.” It’s also worth noting that “organic” does not necessarily mean “natural” and vice versa; in the United States, food that is labeled as “organic” means that it has met USDA standards, which are reasonably stringent but not the toughest in the world. Food labeled “natural,” on the other hand, requires no such rigorous measure and can, in point of fact, be very unnatural indeed—think margarine, or soda pop.

The requirements are tough, but it’s proven worth the trouble for most producers who have chosen to go the organic route. Consumers have proven to be more than willing to pay higher prices for certified organic products, which are gaining more and more market share. Greater yields are still to come.